Tuesday, September 09, 2008

RE: Lipstick on a Pig   [Yuval Levin]

Well, to my question “does anybody really think Obama meant to call Sarah Palin a pig?” the answer appears to be “yes, about a gazillion and a half emailers do think so,” though another half a gazillion don’t. And the video without question looks very very bad. The audience certainly seems to take him to refer to Palin. I think Obama’s choice of words was unbelievably stupid (as it so very often is when he’s not chained to a teleprompter), and I certainly think both he and Biden have completely lost their cool because of Palin and are getting hysterical—Biden’s ugly reference to Palin’s Down syndrome child and stem cell research today is one example. But did he set out to call Palin (or McCain) names? I think it’s a bad gaffe, not an attack. That’s bad enough, but the McCain folks themselves shouldn’t overreact. Let them melt down. Roger Kimball has it right.

09/09 10:17 PMShare